THE CONTINGENT VALUE OF SOCIAL CAPITAL

I present argument and evidence for a structural ecology of social cap ital that describes how the value of social capital to an individual i s contingent on the number of people doing the same work. The informat ion and control benefits of bridging the structural holes-or, disconne ctions between nonredundant contacts in a network-that constitute soci al capital are especially valuable to managers with few peers. Such ma nagers do not have the guiding frame of reference for behavior provide d by numerous competitors, and the work they do does not have the legi timacy provided by numerous people doing the same kind of work. I use network and performance data on a probability sample of senior manager s to show how the value of social capital, high on average for the man agers, varies as a power function of the number of people doing the sa me work.(.)